The popular music tagging service Shazam has reached 250 million users and has unleashed the ability to tag TV shows as well. The added functionality will enable users to find out what music is playing, who's acting on-screen, and more. The service is available in app form for Windows Phone, but it's often overshadowed by Microsoft's own Bing Audio music tagging integration on the mobile platform, which offers identical functionality.

"Each week we get more than two million users. People think it's magical. But the reason people come back is because there's an amazing degree of utility. We noticed that 54 percent of users were using Shazam at least once a week to tag things on TV... so we thought that there's a lot more we can do with this. Interactive TV has been roadkill thus far on the information superhighway."

Shazam has worked with over 140 brands to integrate Shazam inside advertisements, but hopes to also integrate specific TV shows.

If Shazam isn't up your street then fear not as we believe Microsoft will be introducing such functionality into Bing to join its Audio service. The company purchased VideoSurf (www.videosurf.com) which is a startup that enables users to search videos across the likes of YouTube, Hulu, CNN, TMZ, Dailymotion, Comedy Central. The service was demonstrated at E3 earlier this year on the Xbox 360 console. With any luck, we'll be seeing this arriving on Windows Phone.

As well as searching through content, VideoSurf sports audio and facial recognition technology that allows the service to pull information down that's both accurate and relevant to what's currently displayed on the large screen. How this could be implemented on Windows Phone is still a good question - one possibility could be through use of the camera to record a segment of the show / film.

A short conclusion can be drafted that Shazam is expanding its service to cover not only music, but TV as well. It's attempting to become the companion app that every couch potato requires. Microsoft, on the other hand, already has the products and services in the living room. All that's left is to add VideoSurf to Windows 8, Windows Phone and the Xbox and we could be onto a winner.

Currently, Shazam and Shazam Encore are at version 2.2 and have not had an update just yet. We'll keep an eye out if and when that does come forward and do a follow up post. In the meantime, get Shazam (free) here and Shazam Encore ($5.99) here if you're curious.

I must be getting old, when I watch TV, that's all I do.. Is watch the TV. I don't tweet, facebook, shazam, MySpace,google, Bing, blah blah blah. I like to just watch the show or game or whatever else I am watching.

These services like Shazam are good for when you’re driving in a car and listening to the radio and suddenly you hear a music you like but don’t know what it is. So these types of services listen to the music and then they tell you which music it is. In your case, in front of TV, you hear a nice music in the movie and this service tells you which music it is.
I used Shazam before the Mango update, but then it was something wrong with the app just weeks before Mango so I only use Music search from Microsoft since Mango and never look back to Shazam.

I'll continue to use Sound Hound and Bing. I remember one time I was on http://vnmusa.com and I wanted to know the name of a song that was in the background of one of their music videos and Bing found it in no time. +1

shazam is crap, and I uninstalled when they railroaded users with the free unlimited app and threw up a limited free app and then Shazam encore for some ridiculous amount of money. Dead ending and orphaning the original app is what peeved me more than anything, because people who don't read sites like these think there just isn't any updates for the app and get mad and leave.

They did mention that existing users would continue to get unlimited tagging (at least they did when they released the limited app and Encore). When I uninstalled and reinstalled the "updated" app, it recognized my device and gave me unlimited tagging. Others whose devices didn't get recognized apparently had to contact their customer support to get the unlimited tagging applied to them (can't confirm this, but that's what I heard). Either way, I currently have unlimited tagging, so I know they honored old users' unlimited capability. I actually prefer Shazam to SoundHound and Bing because in my experience it has been more consistent especially in noisy environments like cars, restaurants, etc.

I have tried to use the "shazzam now to see additional information" thing on tv about five times. It has never worked. I've never been able to get the app open and "listening" quick enough, so each time I had to rewind the video (I don't know how this would work if i didn't have a dvr) play it and "listen" several times. Never recognized anything. I have since uninstalled the app. Bing audio is faster and works great on music. This was the only reason i would want to keep shazzam on my phone. Not worth the hassle.

Shazam was a Beast on my iPhone. When I switched to Windows Phone I fully intended to use Shazam, but after seeing what Bing can do I uninstalled Shazam. Bing is a more integrated and convenient solution - nothing beats hitting that search button (wish MS would provide universal search). With that being said, my experience was that Shazam did a better job than Bing at tune recognition in noisy environments, something MS should improve.